Reclamation of Inactive Housing announced

[Nalien]

But would you refuse to serve non-regulars in your restaurant just because they don't visit it every month?

I'd refuse to permanently reserve seats for non-regulars... Why should I turn away the actual physical paying customer in front of me, from that seat, just because someone who shows up once every month feels they deserve to have it reserved indefinitely?

You can pay me to reserve that seat, and if you don't show up, that's the same as paying a subscription and not logging in. If you're not paying me to reserve it though? Why on earth would I hold it for you? Someone who actually wants to use it, who is actually paying me for their meal, can use it instead.

By all means, go open a restaurant and use the same logic we have here for housing. You'd have to be spicing your food with narcotics to get people coming back regularly enough... You simply cannot welcome every customer, go "This is your seat FOR LIFE" and then start turning away new customers because all your seats are taken, even though the seats are reserved by people who, for all you know, have passed away. You simply would not be able to run a successful business if you just optimistically sit there going "My first customers who own these chairs will be back today, I'm sure of it!"

That is the issue SE is dealing with here. They have a finite amount of (presumably expensive) server space to hold all this housing data. That's why we have a finite number of plots, a finite number of items we can set. Then they have plots which are owned, effectively, by people who are not using them. No matter what way you try to paint this, that is a waste of resources. Do I have absolute proof that plots are being wasted? No. You know who would have that information, though? SE. It is their servers that are potentially being wasted on non-customers, after all. If they can look at that data, and go "Bloody hell, we have an entire Wards worth of plots owned by people who haven't logged on since March 2014!", then the only logical thing to do is go "Why should we spend money adding these new Wards, when we can just clear up the old ones?", that is what's happening here. The only fault I can peg on SE over all this is not implementing this from the very start in 2.1, anyone could have seen this issue coming...